There are three things I’ve been preoccupied with during the last three days: my family, my “stuff”, and the weather. To make a little more sense, I’ve been home with my family sorting through a bunch of stuff in preparation for a flea market today which was decidedly impacted by the weather (refer to previous post).
The “stuff” part has actually been a lot of fun – oddly perhaps, I find that I get immense satisfaction out of sorting and organizing things, and was happily occupied with this for many hours. And I was positively gleeful when I got rid of a bunch of it – like Thoreau, I had felt burdened by the “tyranny of things”. Having so much stuff is stressful, since I don’t have room for it or use for it, and must exert so much effort to organize it and get rid of it. As he put it, then we do not own our things – they own us. So I felt a freedom of ridding myself of things that I no longer needed – I long to live simply and not feel burdened by so much “stuff”.
The family part has been not quite so fun – what is it about family that brings out the best and the absolute worst in people? At least, that seems to be true for me. We can have so much fun together and share great conversations, yet it takes so little to spark an argument that can easily degenerate into a yelling match. In general I consider myself a fairly decent and kind human being, but when I’m with my family I can be a real jerk and downright mean. I hate when I become that person, and I hate that it takes so little for her to emerge.
It’s sad, really, that family seems to bring out the ugly side of our human nature – because these are the very people who love us the most and have given us the most in life (at least, that’s true for me). The older I get and the more I interact with young kids and their parents, the better I understand the strain of parenthood – the constant demands upon your time and energy and patience, the choices you must make every minute, the many sacrifices, and the sometimes little thanks in return. All of this is done out of love and it is truly an amazing thing – something that I am only really beginning to appreciate in my own parents. Yes they are imperfect, yes they’ve made mistakes, yes they’ve passed on some dysfunctional patterns, but they deserve more from me than the tolerance, condescension, and snappishness that so often characterizes my interactions with them. Why is it that family are often the hardest people to love? Maybe because that is the one place where nothing is glossed over, and we see eachother’s imperfections most clearly…
Reflecting on all of the time I spent with my “stuff” and with my family, I had a lightbulb moment. While my enjoyment for sorting stuff and my frustration with interacting with my family both have definitely roots in my personality and history, they also speak to a fundamental truth about myself – I harbor a need to control. Part of why I love sorting stuff is that I exert ultimate control over it. I can put it in different piles and boxes, organize it by topic or author, and make it do anything I like. I can single-handedly transform great disorder into perfect order, and that gives me a heady feeling. I can’t do any of that with my parents or my brother – in fact, the more I attempt to mold their attitudes and actions into what I want, the more they resist it. I have no control over what they think or say or do, and when I try to make them conform to my timetable or my agenda it is usually in vain. I think the fact that I cannot control them is the source of some of my frustration – bringing a feeling of helplessness rather than power. And the rain today at the most inopportune times seemed to me to be a polite reminder from our Creator that despite our attempts and successes at controlling almost every aspect of our lives, we cannot control the weather – that’s completely up to God.
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